Global Courant
There are likely to be few public celebrations of World Drug Day today in northern Shan State, home to one of the world’s most rampant and lucrative narcotics manufacturing zones. But some smug satisfaction can be expressed among the region’s various gangsters and others who are monetizing the post-coup disorder in Myanmar.
This year’s theme for the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking is “People First: End Stigma and Discrimination, Strengthen Prevention.”
Myanmar’s coup-led military regime, the State Administration Council (SAC) and the Myanmar Police Force (MFP) are enjoying these opportunities to promote their domestic counter-narcotics efforts and exaggerate their commitment to international cooperation.
In a post-truth Myanmar, the promotion of misleading seizure statistics has for years been the method of fooling the world into believing that the central authorities are serious about drug eradication.
The Interior Ministry’s Central Committee for the Control of Drug Abuse (CCDAC) alleges that since the February 2021 coup, seizures of narcotics, including opium, heroin, stimulant tablets (yaba), crystal methamphetamine, marijuana, kratom and kratom powder have all increased.
The regime claims it seized $462 million worth of narcotics in 2021; $533 million by 2022; and $179.53 million through the end of May this year. These are exact numbers: in 2021, the security forces claimed to have seized 198,188,715.5 yaba tablets, to the nearest half of a pill.
But how big is the drug production in Myanmar exactly? The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that opium cultivation has increased by 33% in its 2022 Opium Survey, with an alarming 88% increase in potential yield, possibly producing 790 tonnes.
While the obvious conclusion is that post-coup uncertainty and insecurity are driving the expansion of cultivation, these upward trends may precede the coup. UNODC regional director Jeremy Douglas claimed at the launch of the study in January that “the Golden Triangle is back in the opium trade”.
The border areas of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand have never been free from drug trafficking. Crystal methamphetamine production has risen to an estimated $50-60 billion over the last decade.
Unreliable but indicative seizure data shows that seizures in East and Southeast Asia reached 20,000 kilograms in 2011, reached a record 172,000 kilograms in 2021, and fell to 151,000 in 2022. Still, the price of methamphetamine has fallen across the region despite the higher seizures.
Myanmar police officers stand next to seized drugs to be burned on an International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trade outside Yangon, in a file photo. Photo: AFP
The UNODC and many international states and actors are caught up in the manta that all of this is largely the fault of transnational criminal organizations that collaborate with armed groups that oppose the central authority in Myanmar. This is accurate and has been for decades. But it omits the main partners in the drug consortia: Myanmar’s military and police.
The 2023 UNODC survey did note that; “A small number of methamphetamine laboratories have been discovered in drug-producing regions under regime control. However, there is a significant discrepancy between seized methamphetamine laboratories in Myanmar and the total supply of methamphetamine, with the only laboratories seized by Myanmar authorities between 2022 and early 2023 being smaller tablet factories in South Shan, near the Thai border, which does not correspond to the reality of the market.”
The drug trade in Myanmar thrives thanks to the complex network of security arrangements between the Myanmar military, its local militias, ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), the shelter of transnational criminal actors, and a deep-rooted culture of corruption and entwined criminal industries.
The post-coup descent into internal chaos and increased illegality is simply a contemporary chapter of a decades-long dynamic that has made domestic production unproblematic. But exactly how much is being done to curb drug production and to what extent is the international community cooperating in this charade?
In Myanmar, access to drugs has skyrocketed since the coup, with police apparently spending more time on extortion rackets than actual drug crackdowns. Drugs are reportedly offered and consumed openly in karaoke joints (KTV) in major cities. The powerful drug ketamine is said to be readily available, but to what extent is difficult to measure.
The SAC Interior Minister who has the CCDAC in his portfolio, Army Lieutenant General Soe Htut marked this year’s World Drug Day with a statement promising to be more people-oriented.
“Assessing the current drug problem, law enforcement and judicial action cannot solve the problem in isolation. A balanced approach also requires attention to public health care, improving living standards, promoting humanity, supporting development and protecting fundamental human rights. Instead of punishing drug addicts as criminals, the government and civil society organizations have worked together to change laws and regulations to promote drug addiction as a health problem rather than a crime.”
Yet that has been the biggest lack of official approaches in Myanmar for years, with syndicates almost given free reign to establish production zones, crack down on small-scale producers and punish drug users with long prison terms.
The 2018 National Drug Policy is actually an effective approach to the challenges of drug use, but it is inconsistent with repressive drug laws first enacted in the early 1990s under a previous military junta. Nevertheless, Soe Htut claimed that the SAC instructs regional and national authorities to “establish action plans consistent with their premises to carry out counter-narcotics activities in a practical manner”.
Given the general breakdown of law and order in Myanmar, drug suppression will either be an extremely low priority or officials will use it as an additional means of control to combat armed and nonviolent resistance.
World Drug Day also provides a platform for the military to declare its cooperation with the United Nations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), regional law enforcement agencies such as the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Thai Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB).
Much of this cooperation buzzes in a depoliticized environment of professional niceties, never mentioning that some of the worst offenders in protecting the drug trade that floods the region with crystal methamphetamine are Myanmar security agents who have a long and sordid line of double standards. to have. Yet regional partnerships are a necessary fiction.
A member of the United Wa State Army displays Ya Ba pills before being set on fire during a drug burning ceremony to mark the UN World Day Against Drugs in Poung Par Khem, near the Thailand-Myanmar border on June 26, 2017. Photo : AFP / Ye Aung Thu
ASEAN’s Narcotics Cooperation Center’s (using the delightful acronym of ASEAN-NARCO) “Golden Triangle 1511 Operation” covers China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand and has been collaborating since 2019 on information sharing on drug precursor flows and drug shipments.
But taken over a longer period of time, it is clear that Myanmar is gaining some legitimacy for regional cooperation, while it does not have to do much to address the production zones in the Shan state. It is one of the Myanmar regime’s diplomatic tactics, rejecting concerted drug suppression efforts while rejecting ASEAN’s five-point consensus to deal with the political crisis.
The Australian Federal Police continues to liaise with the MPF regarding the sharing of drug trafficking intelligence. During hearings on the Senate estimates in November 2022, AFP Deputy Commissioner Ian McCartney told the committee:
“There has been contact with the Myanmar Police Force, not with regard to training and capacity building, but with regard to matters of concern to the AFP, particularly with regard to drug trafficking. Contextually, 70% of the methamphetamine that ends up on the streets in Australia comes from Myanmar. So there has been some involvement. It’s limited. It is under the auspices of an agreement we have with DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) to ensure that any involvement is strictly limited to those issues.
In the decade from 2012 to 2022, Australia seized 9.9 million tonnes of crystal methamphetamine, most of which came from Myanmar’s Shan State. Taking stock of production timelines and increases in production over the past decade, it is clear that Myanmar’s drug trade grew during the decade of conditional civilian rule, when the world supported a so-called “democratic transition.”
Given the current post-coup disorder, what hope is there that regional cooperation will have any positive effect? And how much does international aid, even intelligence sharing, cost to help the SAC with domestic control while maintaining complex relationships with multiple armed and illegal actors involved in the narcotics trade?
As Christopher Hitchens once said of America’s “war on drugs,” “this isn’t a war, it’s a misuse of the word, it’s a monitoring device.” Any credible or humanistic SAC drug reform is highly unlikely, condemning another generation of Myanmar people to cheap and readily available drugs with few harm reduction programs and continued punitive sentencing.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues in Myanmar
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